Unless, of course, the specific goal is to maintain a status hierarchy simply for the sake of staying on top of it, with no real concern for the costs or benefits of that hierarchy.

Yep. Being determines consciousness, and social being in particular is a great predictor of social consciousness. And cheering for authoritarianism among high-IQ, economically secure, white, male, first-world, tech geeks is going to school in black - increasingly so.

I mean, just regular old proclamations that Liberal Democracy Ain't All That? Pfft, that's been among the safest and most polite kinds of contrarian posturing since before there were liberal democracies to snub. Every political position imaginable can do it from some angle. I do it. Respectable authors do it.

But direct, unapologetic support for the aesthetics and praxis of dictatorial control? The beauty and utility of hierarchies of dominance? Of deliberate asymmetries of power? Unsettling.